The rooms in the houses were quite small, with low ceilings. The small windows, whether they were merely fitted with wooden shutters or glazed with many small panes kept together with strips of lead, lighted the rooms but poorly. The closeness of the houses made internal lighting still less effective. The interior walls were of timbering and plaster, often white- or colour-washed.[5] Panelling was used occasionally. The ventilation and hygienic conditions generally were far from good, as may be imagined from a consideration of the smallness of the houses, the compactness of the city, particularly the parts occupied by the people, and especially of the primitive system of sanitation, which was content to use the front street as a main sewer. There were, of course, no drains; at most there was a gutter along the middle of a street, or at each side of the roadway. It was the traditional practice to dump house and workshop refuse into the streets. Some of it was carried along by rainwater, but generally it remained: in any case it was noxious and dangerous. There was legislation on the subject, for the evil was already notorious in the fourteenth century. The first parliamentary attempt to restrain people in towns generally from thus corrupting and infecting the air is dated 1388. The many visits of distinguished people and public processions always conferred an incidental boon on the city, for one of the essentials of preparation was giving the main streets a good cleaning. There is no wonder that plagues perpetually harassed the people of mediæval times and reduced the population miserably. The plague never disappeared till towns were largely rebuilt on a more commodious scale in the next great building era, which began in 1666 in London and in the early years of the eighteenth century elsewhere. No advance was made in sanitation till the Victorian Age, when town sanitation was completely revolutionised and, for the first time, efficiently organised. The house fire was of wood and peat, though coal was also used. For artificial lighting oil-lamps (wicks in oil) and candles were used. A light was obtained from flint and tinder, the latter being ignited by a spark got from striking the flint with a piece of metal.